Sunday, July 27, 2008

China Will Be a Superpower Beacuse it Will Kill its Old People

John Pomfret at WaPo, who used to be the paper's Beijing reporter, writes that China is never going to amount to anything despite all the hype: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/25/AR2008072502255.html?hpid=opinionsbox1One of the main reasons he cites is demographics. China's one child policy has led to a situation where the population is aging and where in a few decades there will be hundreds of millions of old people taking up space and breathing air that could be put to more productive purposes. That is going to drag China down.Not so fast, say I. Don't think for a minute that Chairman Mao and his successors failed to consider the demographic impact of their policy. They just reckoned that (a) by the time it was a problem they'd be dead, and (b) any supernumerary old people could be conveniently disappeared. The Party will simply inform them that their duty is to die in order that the glorious Peoples' Republic might prosper. After all, they owe their increased life spans to the work of the Party, and they should have been dead long ago if the Party had not intervened to make China a land of health and happiness.China has never blinked when it came to sacrificing some of its people for the greater good, and I am certain that accelerating the deaths of a couple of hundred million oldsters will be an easy decision for the Party.